Magickal Realism

I had a friend in college who referred to perfume as “f — me juice.” She especially referred to it as such when I wore it, since the only time I did was when I was hanging around a certain graduate student I had a crush on at the time. And her naming wasn’t off: perfumes are used to communicate, and until recently, that communication was limited to the three big reasons:

3. As a form of prayer/wordless emoting to the divine.
2. As a way of establishing power - the woman with the strongest and most expensive perfume wins the female dominance battle, and
1. As a way of signalling sexual availability, now that stripping off your shirt and yelling “Come and get it!” is frowned upon even in the most uncouth of society.

Pheromones are hormones we contain in our own body, just as many other creatures contain pheromones.¹ They are scentless, yet we perceive and respond to them in ways that can’t be fathomed. They are nature’s “f— me juice.”

Perfumers have wanted to get their hands on the perfect pheromone or imitation pheromone from the moment they knew what it was. Probably from before then - without that concept hovering in the subconscious, a story like “>Perfume would never have worked.

Even if we could bottle up the essence of human, it would be grizzly. As it is, the closest we can get to pheromones are borrowed and imitated from other creatures, including musk deer, civet cats, and the most preferred source for synthetic pheromone still involves grinding up bugs to toss in your bottle. On top of it, even though we know something happens as a result of our response to each other, it’s just not quite the same as what’s recognized in other animals.²

So while there are perfumes out there that hawk their pheromone spike, there aren’t guarantees. If you’re getting more action after using it, it could be the placebo effect: you figure you’re emitting, and consequently, you really do emit.

1. United Press International, March 19, 2002 p1008079w1255 [↩]
2. Discover; Sep99, Vol. 20 Issue 9, p21, 1/3p [↩]

We’re all wired differently. So differently, in fact, that what brings pleasure to one person will bring dislike, revulsion, or even pain to another person. This is especially true of perfumes. There is no perfume or perfumer on this planet that can guarantee - or even hope to accomplish - something that smells so good that everyone loves it. As strange as it may sound, there are folks who hate the scent and taste of chocolate, find lead and manure comforting, and then there are those with the double-edged fortune of no sense of smell at all.

((image by giuvax on flickr))

I for one do not think that my perfume detractors should suffer - they may detract what I make, but if they’re wired to wince at the scents created by me, their experience is comeback enough. I’ve certainly staggered around holding my nose after the fact as though it would help after a bad run in with a department store perfume counter. I can’t help what someone else’s brain and body chemistry will do, and I can only move on to the next formula.

However, rather than living with what offends thine nose, here are a few suggestions:
1. Compost it.
All my fragrances ARE from natural materials. While the fragrances containing tobacco (such as Ball Gag) might better be mixed into an organic pesticide, for the most part the contents of a bottle would go just fine in with all the other fertilizing flotsam from your home. And the bottle, after a rince with rubbing alcohol, is completely recyclable.

2. Swap it.
Oh come on, I know lots of you do it. There are some great communities on livejournal, and other places around the net. You can even go to perfume based swap meets these days if you know where to look. I’m seeing decant kits appear in major catalogs - you think we don’t know this goes on?

3. Resell it.
As long as it’s clearly labeled as a resale and not a point-of-source original sale, I’m OK with it. Besides, every single scent I’ve made has ended with someone somewhere declaring themselves an aficionado. I don’t always get it - I personally don’t understand the popularity of
Fairy, for instance, as it’s too sweet and simple for my tastes - but every time I try to remove it from my store someone asks. Just because you don’t love it doesn’t mean it won’t have a home somewhere.

4. Use it in a practical joke.
Some of you have been subject to those horrific practical jokes where someone leaves a dead fish in the back of your car or a roast under the bed. Use your less-than-fave perfumes to manufacture similar, if slightly less aggressively painful, entertainment. (I do not advocate you do property damage in the course of such a prank, and please make efforts to find out if your target has skin or scent allergies first. First, do no harm. Then, drive batty for short bursts).

5. Gift it.
I’m pretty straightforward about the notes in my fragrances, and it’s worth determining the aromatherapeutic effects. Some of my stuff may not appeal to you because you just don’t need what’s in it - but someone around you might need the olfactory-emotional boost. Make the world a better place by doing something small to lighten another person’s burden.

Sweet dreams, may you succeed in your quest for the scent that pleases you most!

About twice a month, I get someone asking me about men’s fragrances versus women’s fragrances - someone wants to avoid smelling “girly”or too “musky/guylike.” Despite my repeated explanations that gender doesn’t exist in something you bottle, only in the hormonal combination your body produces, the question and perception persists.

I think part of it is the current ”style.” For some reason, it’s very trendy among women to smell like food. And for men, cologne is their signal of sexual interest - and usually, there’s nothing subtle about that signal. While there are theories that men’s cologne is mixed stronger to a)mask their stronger body odors and b)because
the men who wear cologne can’t smell as well as women (there is some corroborative data on that), I think it comes down to one of our many odd socio-cultural beliefs: because men and women smell differently, we assume that different perfumes for men and women should smell differently.

 ((Image by mikefl99 on flickr))

But it really isn’t necessary - not even remotely. Even though we soap ourselves as close to scentlessness as we can manage these days, that body odor still remains, though heavily muted. And every perfumer knows about that body odor. It’s the bane and blessing of our existence, why eau d’ gorgeous on one person smells like eau d’ skunk on the other: it’s your unique scent, your body marker, your indicator. That unique odor of yours is the final scent in any perfume blend.

The only thing a men’s fragrance needs to smell like a man is the man, on a woman, the woman. Gender attributions of “this makes me smell girly/too boyish” really are purely based on pre-established gender conceptions, and that’s a conversation you’d need to have with your parents - perhaps before performing an intervention for the common abuse of violet perfumes.

These comments of mine now raise the question: so why offer men’s fragrances at all? And from fellow feminists, why serve the overserved patriarchy?

To which I answer: men are often intimidated by the world of perfume, and even though it’s socially acceptable for them to smell good - in fact, socially encouraged - they still need their “man cave” section. Since their palates have been cultivated in a specific direction since birth - towards trees, mosses, musks, and tobaccos - I make this available to them. I also make it easy for them to subtley sneak away from these expectations, like an open secret emitting from their pulse points; that’s why my packages and labelling are gender neutral and small enough to hide in a pocket.

Unisex is in the olfactory nerve of the beholders, just as gender is. But as to what is beheld…well, that’s a whole different cultural arena to the senses.

*Check out mikefl99’s flickr stream

I shop at the Farmer’s Market when I can manage it (OK, once, in a downpour, and since parking is horrible, not since) and at my coop (regularly, since it’s literally a walk across the street). I do buy local whenever I can; if given a choice between blueberries from Indiana or Michigan, I choose Michigan (more similar climate) and if I can get my hands on Minnesotan blueberries because they are closer. But then I have some guilt because I’m a born Hoosier, I still consider myself a Hoosier, and I’ll sometimes throw in the Indiana blueberries anyway as juicy props to my state - and then I put it back. There’s more than corn in Indiana, there’s a whole lot of industrial pollution, too.

People who live off of local food only, even in a top 10 agriculture-and-vegetarian friendly city like mine, have it tough.  Every coop in town imports vegetables from South America in the winter (though unlike supermarkets, they do tell you where it’s from. And even though it’s possible to get a lot of buffalo and fish around here in winter, resources are limited and if you’re a vegetarian you’re out of luck unless you are really resourceful with indoor gardening and have already had a talk with the police about all the plant lights in your home.

So I’m trying to imagine creating perfumes from only local products. While I certainly incorporate everything local I can, as an apartment dweller, I rely just as heavily on essential oil producers as my counterparts, and even the most informed of my client base would go through some serious withdrawal - whenever I mention, for instance, that sandalwood is an endangered species, I get a response bordering on PTS blocking.

Still, I’m trying to picture the quintessential Minnesotan fragrance. It would have to have notes from sand, silt, grass, and lilacs, I think. Given where I live there would be neighborhood drivebys where innocent citizens found that any part of the bush that tread onto a public sidewalk got clipped. I’m more than willing to hang out of a car window with giant shears in one hand and a basket in the other. There certainly is a lot of fauna I could use around here - any hardy herb that can survive harsh northern winter, evergreens of every variety, and wildflowers so long as no one caught me digging around their lawns.

But there would be so much loss, more than most I think could bear: gone would be frankincense, sandalwood and jasmine. Anything gardenia or carnation would be straight out of the question. Vanilla and cocoa absolutes? Forget it. Possibly most painful of all would be the loss of citrus - ne’er a sweet orange or tangerine note to be found. And the bases, ugh, the bases - it would pretty much be corn oil or nothing.

Also - my clientele isn’t local. Minnesotans aren’t trusting folk, and won’t buy from me until they have a store to walk into. So even if I made these fabulous local goods, the best I could hope for is to sell them to out-of-staters online. It’s an interesting challenge, even with the corn-based base limitation, and I might just try a version of it to see where it goes. But in terms of overall pragmatism, buying local only just doesn’t work in the world of perfume - not until the day that I can claim my own plantations on three continents, not counting the inevitable fields required in Grasse!

Perfume has become a lot like wine: people talk about layers, and depth, and I’m waiting for someone to gargle from a bottle of, say, Tom Ford’s Black Orchid, spit it out and declare the hue was “off” as a cheap cover for an embarrassing alcoholism-driven act. And yet, as some of the more humble - and secure - connoisseurs of the vine will tell you, all those fancy terms about acidity and body are just trappings. The same is true of layering, body, and even how long perfume lasts. Whether it’s wine or perfume, it comes down quite simply to what you like, and that has so many personal factors that it would be quite possible to create 7 billion perfumes for 7 billion people on this planet because of all the variations between body chemistry and emotive response to smell.

For the perfume seeker, defining that elusive joy can be quite the journey, and that’s why entire cultures spring up that critique art and food, wine and perfume. It’s also extremely common for someone to decide if you have good taste based solely on their own taste; just reference Blackwell, the king of declaring himself an arbiter of taste (you ask a guy his opinion once, and he thinks it counts forever…) A lot of the times, you end up buying into it because the person dictating fashion, or scent, or actual taste, is just that freakin’ convincing. Most of the time, the arbiter of things good and bad is just another ass with an opinion - but somehow, that opinion gets taken with finely ground cardamom instead of the grain of good old table salt.

I’m all about the anti-pretentious. My fragrances have a sense of humor to them, as you can tell from looking at some of the names. And because I slip into mocking the self-important so much and so easily, it still pains me to admit: sometimes those arbiters of taste have got a point. I’ve had bad wine in the past - really bad wine. It wasn’t a matter of personal taste. It was just really bad wine, so much that despite my love of all things Australian, I will veer away from any wine bottle with a kangaroo on it. If I’d listened to those arbiters on that one occasion, I would not have resorted to wasting $20 on what essentially became a method of trapping fruit flies. The same has happened with perfume. It pains me equally to admit that sometimes the arbiters of taste have been right about me - some of my blends are mediocre, but they’re incongruously popular, so I keep them, because people ask for them every damn time I try to take them off the market.

But I’m not going to tell you what those are, and I have a good, non-commercial reason for it: my reason is you. Every single person has a different body chemistry, and although I’ve been tempted to start surveying people for blood type as some whacked-out way of filing how a perfume will react on a certain person, it’s just not practical or achievable. Plus I think it would creep people out.

For instance, my autumn fragrance - on a person of average metabolism, it smells as advertised - like burning leaves. Usually the cinnamon and black pepper notes linger in particular. However, on my mother, it goes straight to wintergreen. This is OK with my mom, she loves wintergreen. But between the methyl salicylate scares and the fact that mint is rarely used in commercial perfumes, this gets a confused response from that one person in 25 who buys Autumn and winds up going, “hey, where’s the leaf?”

You are the final note in every perfume. So even if something doesn’t smell right in the bottle, it’s important to try it on your skin. There are people that can make $1000/oz perfume smell rancid and the $5 Walgreen’s bottle smell fantastic - and it’s all in the personal chemistry. It’s also important to leave the scent on your skin for awhile. First, if you want to join the club of “perfumistas” then this gives you practice for layers and unfolding. It also helps you watch for any warning signs of allergy (you try it on one wrist before you slather or spritz it all over).

This also means that you can’t always take someone else’s word for it. If they open the bottle and describe it as ”smells like 
skunk!” that’s a warning to consider. If it smells great like a bottle but goes to skunk on the skin, then you should wait and see if three to five other people, or just brave getting a sample and finding out what it does on you.

I’ve had a custom request sitting neglected for weeks now. First, the request involved materials that aren’t readily available naturally - at least not in convenient forms like essential oil. So I had to wait three weeks or so to do infusions, and since I was on a tight time and financial budget, I wasn’t able to do the thing where you add fresh goodies  to the oil daily. I relied on the sun to cook out the best of it, wrapping each jar tightly and turning it upwards to greet the morning.

One of the scents I was trying to distill naturally was white willow bark. I am remiss in that I did not break into anyone’s yard to go sniff a willow tree (hey, perfumers have duties)- instead, I bought myself a bottle of extract so I could get some neighborhood of what my likely weaker infusion would smell like.

Even allowing a couple extra weeks did not help with the willow infusion, so tonight, I turned to more drastic measures: I took the infusion I already had, added a new batch of willow bark, and made an oil-based decoction.

The give was slightly better, but not by much. First, I had the disadvantage of working on a gas stove.¹ It heats up super fast, so I had to pull the mixture off the stove really quickly lest the oil actually burn black. On an electric stove, the slower heat up time would have allowed for a simmering effect that might have imparted something more than what I was able to eke out.

There was a vague scent, but I couldn’t picture my average customer sniffing it out. So I added a couple drops of the willow extract and shook. It won’t look pretty, but that’s one of the better reasons to use dark bottles. My concern now is the alcohol-y top scent; it fades after 20 minutes, but I’m not wild about it - if I’d been thinking, I would have run the extract through a filter first.

1. Gas versus electric stoves is a subject of much debate in my household, because my boyfriend likes convenience. Anyone who works with herbs as much as I do sees much more convenience in that slow path. [↩]

I’m seeing less of it these days, but I’m still seeing it: “We give you these perfume oils pure! Undiluted!” Countless Ebay sellers have used this exact phrasing, enticing consumers over to their particular brand of commercial fragrance imitations. These claims of undiluted oils are either false, or for reasons to be discussed, meaningless, so move on to another
seller when listings are earmarked by such hawking.

Dilution is the process by which something is made less concentrated; because this is often described as “weakened” consumers immediately assume that if a substance is diluted, it isn’t as good. This is especially true of North American consumers. The fact of the matter is not only do you not want most of
these fun-smelling goodies at full strength on your skin, having them at full strength with the wrong chemical
could seriously hurt you. Even essential oils that have no history of damage upon skin contact are less than ideal when
undiluted - just ask anyone who has to sit next to you in a car. Given the rampant allergies and asthmas people have these
days, getting into any closed space with heavy perfume on is downright mean. The French take on fine perfume is a good one: a little bit, applied lightly, goes a very, very long way.

The most common dilution-error scent is probably cinnamon. Many, many people enjoy bath and body products with this fragrancing in it, especially during the holidays. It’s warm, and lively, and stimulates lots of memories of past holidays and happiness. Properly diluted, it still gives off a potent and warming scent. But one drop of undiluted oil on your skin and you
will be in pain.¹ This needs to be diluted. Even essential oils that do not cause immediate pain need dilution to be worn safely - without it, a host of issues may occur including sensitivity to light, an increased tendency towards allergic reaction, and on the socially responsible side, smelling of something so strongly that you create an aversion to the scent in those around you.

Dilution is, also, a way of making things less affordable more affordable. Here’s where the direct fibbing comes in - sometimes a fragrance oil has the same name as an essential oil. For instance, a woman I know loves the scent of neroli. She swore up and down to me that she bought an ounce of neroli, undiluted, for around $15. Even a low quality neroli is around $115/ounce at the time I write this; if it had been true, undiluted neroli, there’s no way she would have been spreading it around her at the time pregnant belly - the cost would have been far too dear.

So when you see these “undiluted!” ads, be wary. If the owner is not directly fibbing about adding a reasonable proporition of base oil or alcohol to a fragrance mix, then what is more probable is that the “pure” oil is “pure” fragrance oil. In that case, being sold a fragrance “undiluted” means that the seller is really giving you a decant at a slight profit.²

So here’s the truth, undiluted: dilutions are good for you. If you want natural perfume, you want it diluted!

1. If this should happen, immediate neutralize it with hydrogen peroxide or vinegar. Do not use soap and water until after you have neutralized it - oil and water, not friends. [↩]
2. Decant circles are popular among fans of cult perfume houses because they can increase their collections at low cost by swapping out small amounts of fragrances with one another. [↩]